The Balcony View

I still do not have a drone, but at first glance it may seem like an aerial photo, but it is not 🙂 This is the view of the balcony of Italy, an amazing place between Italy and Switzerland. In particular this incredible view is on the mountain of Sighignola for the occasion often called the balcony of Italy for the view overlooking the lake of Lugano

The place is reached by a small road that crosses the mountains, the place once reached is a large terrace overlooking this view that you see. Since I took this picture in December here at 1300 meters the wind was very cold and very strong. I did all very wide bracketing to capture the whole dynamic range between the strong light of the horizon and the shadows near the lake

WORKFLOW EXPLANATION

I stacked all the shots into layers and I blended them using luminosity masks, I started from the darker shots to end with the brightest to reach the right luminosity balance

Using my panel, I launched details and dodge and burn to increase lights around the darker parts of the mountain. After a soft orton effect I fixed lights and darks using luminosity masks applied to curves layer to increase the luminosity of the sky and the darker parts of the image

I fixed color cast and I increase the yellows using a warming filter, with the clone stamp tool I removed some spots and some other littl unwanted element in the frame

As always I hope you will find all this usefull. I’m happy to ear this from you!

Site Founder

Hi, my name is Giuseppe Sapori, a professional photographer and author of this website, created by yours truly to show my work and share with you the techniques I use. My expertise is in the field of Landscape Photography... (Read More)